Traditionally, entities have large information technology infrastructures for maintaining computer systems, software, and documents generated or received by the entity. Typically the information technology infrastructure comprises several mainframe servers that include software that requires regular maintenance and upgrading to ensure proper performance.
Each entity may have one or more database management systems (such as relational database management systems) designated to serve one or more different operating system platforms within an entity. Of course, with the advancement technology each part of the information technology infrastructure, such as the software, management systems, operating systems, or the like need to be regularly maintained and upgraded.
Various vendors may provide maintenance and/or upgrades to the parts of the information technology infrastructure. Many of the maintenance and/or upgrades are directed from a vendor and are products such as software designed to integrate into that vendor's parts of the information technology infrastructure deployed at the entity. As such, each software upgrade has a program name, run time, update function and the like specific for that vendor.
In a large entity with many mainframe servers, it may take several days/weeks/months to apply one maintenance fix onto each environment. As such, over a period of time, multiple maintenance fixes may be being implemented at different stages at the same time. Since each maintenance fix or upgrade is implemented from a different vendor, at a different stage, or from a different part of the entity there are different processes, different ways of working, different ways of recording the maintenance information, and the like. In this way, querying maintenance status on any given infrastructure product becomes very person-dependent. Thus only the agent working on the maintenance may have knowledge of the maintenance information and status.